Book Review: “Made To Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath

Top 10 Takeaways from “MADE TO STICK” by Chip and Dan Heath

1. Stickiness means that your ideas are easily remembered, understood, and have a lasting impact- they change your audience’s behavior.

2. The oldest class of naturally sticky ideas is the proverb – a nugget of wisdom that often endures over centuries and across cultures.

3. The Six Principles of Stickiness are SUCCESs: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions and Stories.

4. The Villain to Stickiness is the “Curse of Knowledge,” which is a naturally psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles.

5. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Instead of creating detailed plans, articulate a Commander’s Intent, which is a crisp, plain-talk statement that specifies the goals and desired end of an operation. As soon as people understand the Commander’s Intent, they begin generating their own solutions.

6. Get to the Core. To get to the core, we’ve got to eliminate the superfluous and tangible elements. You must weed out the really important ideas that are not the most important idea. A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

7. If you say three things, you don’t say anything.

8. Tversky and Shafir’s study shows that the more options people have, the more paralyzed they become. Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst.

9. Most technology and product-design projects must combat “feature creep,” the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until they no longer perform their original functions very well. When your remote control has fifty buttons, you can’t change the channel anymore.

10. The first problem of communication is getting people’s attention. We can’t demand attention, we must attract it. The most basic way to get someone’s attention is to break a pattern. Surprise gets our attention. Interest keeps our attention.